I'm not sure which is the best forum to put this in, but I assume it will be somewhat easy to fix so I thought I'd come in here. I recently downloaded and compiled the 2.4.26 kernel. I started by copying the .config file from the old source tree to the new and running make oldconfig, so all the settings should have been the same as 2.4.22 which works fine. I didn't change any display or video settings in the kernel config, and when I made the changes to /etc/lilo.conf, I didn't change any of the framebuffer information. I can get into the old kernel and it works fine. However, when I try to boot to the new kernel, nothing appears on the screen - it just stays black. I can tell that everything is working though, since I can wait until there is no hard disk activity, type my username and password, and use ctrl-alt-del to reboot and that works fine. Still I'm not getting any display for some reason. What could be causing this?

Thanks,
Johnathan

what graphics card do you use?

Yeah that has happened to me when I didn't compile vesa in and it sounds like you have logo support which needs to be compiled unless you use an initrd and set it up properly. I would run a make menuconfig in /usr/src/linux and checkout what's there for logo support. Just type " kernel-name vga=normal " at the lilo prompt and that will let you boot into the new kernel and check the logs so you can figure out what is going on. Check /var/log/messages and dmesg | less. Hope that helps. It sounds like everything is loaded as modules. Try changing it to compiled for vesa and logo support.

The video card is a "32MB ATI Mobility RADEON 9000." I'm a little confused about why this kernel works and the new one doesn't since I did a make oldconfig and, as far as I know, used the same settings to compile.

What are logo support and vesa and where are they in the make menuconfig menus? If they are compiled in as modules, what again is the process to install a module (is it just modprobe MOD_NAME, or isn't there a file it has to be added to)? If they aren't compiled in at all, can I just change the settings in menuconfig and then make modules;make modules_install, or do I have to run the entire process all over again (make dep, bzImage, etc.)? Thanks again.

vesa and logo support cant be loaded as modules, they have to be built in...anyway i think they're under character devices-graphics-...(not too sure)

There's nothing like that under Character Devices that I can find. Also, I searched the .config file generated by make menuconfig and neither "vesa" nor "logo" were found anywhere in the file. Finally, I was able to get into it successfully by passing "vga=normal" to the kernel, and I didn't see any suspicious messages in either dmesg or /var/log/messages. This is getting frustrating... why isn't the framebuffer working? If vesa and logo are kernel options, why don't they appear in the .config file? Thanks again.

EDIT:
I just went hunting around some more and I think I found out why this is happening. I had turned out off the "Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers" option, so the frame buffer choice didn't appear (apparently it's considered experimental). I guess these have to be compiled directly into the kernel, so I'll do the whole recompile over again I suppose.

One last question for those still looking at this thread... I know the frame buffer gives you more lines and better-looking (in my opinion) consoles, so what are the disadvantages to this (specifically, why is it considered experimental)? I read somewhere that you need to not use the framebuffer and manually tweak XFree86 settings to get optimal performance, but to what extent is this true? If I want to be able to use the 3D acceleration of my video card, even if I use the ATI drivers for this, am I going to need to get rid of the framebuffer for this to work. I'm a little confused about how all this video stuff works.

Thanks again for helping me solve this, hopefully it'll work after the recompile.

EDIT #2:
Sorry for the excessively long post. I have one more question. Do I need to enable "ATI Radeon display support" under "Frame-buffer support" if that's the card I have? It sounds like the VESA driver will be all I need, but the helpfile on that option makes me think it might be necessary:

ATI Radeon display support (EXPERIMENTAL NEW):
Choose this option if you want to use an ATI Radeon graphics card as a framebuffer device. There are both PCI and AGP versions. You don't need to choose this to run the Radeon in plain VGA mode.

1) use framebuffer...though its consider experimental(for the 2.4 series), its still safe to use..
2) choose vesa vga.. dont choose the ATI specific drivers. i had problems choosing the NVIDIA drivers for my framebuffer device.

Thanks again, it all seems to be working fine now.